Reviews

Resistance 2

There's a palpable and real tension to the proceedings that felt absent from most of the first game. At any given point, if you're not careful, you will die quickly. If your tactics aren't sound, you will die repeatedly. You might hit the credits in less than ten hours, but you'll have to work to get to that final performance screen. Fortunately, for each time that Resistance 2 spits in your face and laughs at you, it also rewards you with a visually dazzling moment. Even if that moment wants to disembowel you.

Since its introduction, Insomniac has touted Resistance 2's attention to scale, and the game really achieves a sense of grandiosity. Graphics fanatics will probably gripe about its textures, which aren't always refined, but there's little argument that for every muddy-looking burned-out car there's an incredible vista to behold, from the Icelandic military base where the action starts to the jaw-dropping view at the finale of the Twin Falls, Idaho section.

In this U.S. gone topsy-turvy, America's expansive terrain is exploited to the fullest. Most importantly, since everything in America is bigger, so are Resistance 2's bosses, from the oft-touted Leviathan, a creature rivaling King Kong in size, to the vicious Kraken that menaces San Francisco Bay. The only element of these epic boss battles that feels like a letdown is that once you've figured out how to topple these grandiose monstrosities, the fights end up easier than the myriad foot soldiers you've had to endure to reach these end battles.

Experience is Everything

The glue that binds Resistance 2 together is its experience system. No matter what you're doing, as long as you're successfully connecting bullets with Chimera, you're gaining XP. Once you've cracked the campaign, you'll walk away with a nice chunk of experience to your character, and will have probably leveled up a few ranks. Whether you want to continue down the road of gaining rank by replaying campaign or jumping into multiplayer is your choice, but based on our play time, the single-player game is really just the beginning of a much broader experience.

Multiplayer is really at the core of Resistance 2, and it's the core reason to keep coming back. Much as the first game wore the influence of Half-Life 2 on its sleeve, it's not hard to see the DNA of Call of Duty 4 and Team Fortress 2 here, though that's not a bad thing. Both competitive or cooperative modes share certain core mechanics: the berserk system, and the continuous accrual of XP. Unlike the single-player campaign, multiplayer gives real-time feedback on just how much experience you're gaining. With each successful hit there's an XP counter that pops up above the head of the enemy. The berserk system resembles CoD4's Perk system. You'll get a special power activated as you gain kills and XP. Some of them help your teammates, and some are designed to enhance your abilities.